Like this:

Yesterday I showed the threshold of a New York spring. As several people noticed I stopped by the Lighthouse on my walk.

I then headed off to get up to the bridge. I took a different route this time. It involves an underpass beneath the West Side Highway…

It is a charming place. From there you have several choices. I decided to go under the northbound off ramp…

but soon enough I was up on the bridge looking back on the way I had come and the way I would return home and wondering what kind of idiot would possibly ruin their political career by ordering the shutdown of three lanes leading on to a bridge that carried 102 million (102,000,000) vehicles in 2013.

“Fantasy, abandoned by reason, produces impossible monsters; united with it, she is the mother of the arts and the origin of marvels.”

Goya

The weekly photo challenge is abandoned. I already took one pass at it here. Today I thought I would revisit 2011 and my first visit to the abandoned Glenwood Power Station in Yonkers. It thrusts itself into the Hudson.

There is a plan to turn this into a hotel but other than ripping apart much of the inside, there has not been much “progress”. Before the demolition started the interior looked like this.

Other views:

The Accidental Cootchie Mama is on an epic journey walking the Natchez Trace to help publicize her first novel “To Live Forever An Afterlife Journey Of Meriwether Lewis” and posted today about The Elizabeth Female Academy which truly fits the theme. #toliveforeverbook

Lots of possibilities there but for today… It is my habit to take pictures. Then bring them home and edit them down. Then work on them. It is my habit to start with the original:

I bring the image into Lightroom and first check the White Balance, exposure and contrast

All of this is on an as needed basis of course. Then I adjust the shadows and highlights

Finally I fine tune and straighten as needed (many people would do that first but for some reason I hold off until the end.) Fine tuning is working with the detail curve, the saturation and luminance levels, and sharpening.

Not every image gets this treatment. Some get more and some less but this is my basic workflow habit.

The other day I mentioned that at the end of the Boro Walk I saw a Banksy work on 24th and 10th Avenue. I thought I should show it to you.

Now Bansky got his start as a graffiti artist and that is what he primarily remains. A number of the pieces he has already done in NYC have been tagged or painted over by local graffiti artists since they don’t like him. In Brooklyn a man has placed armed guards in front of several pieces to protect them from vandals. There are deep levels of irony in that, I think.

This particular piece had the feel of a temporary site specific installation and when I went back Monday morning I found this.

On the north-west side of 10th and 24th we have another longer term installation. It is The Sheep Station, a work by Francois Xavier Lalanne. It goes something like this.

My first view was actually taken on a very cloudy drizzly day and I worked it over good to saturate it. Darkroom, Lightroom, Photoshop…the tools are handled differently but it is all the same.

I took my second view on a bright sunny day with a subject already deeply saturated in color. I adjust the white balance and made one other change. I shot this in Camera Standard but used Lightroom to change to Camera Vivid.